


Those Who Dwell In Darkness

by Talimee, Urania_baba



Series: Songs of Skyrim [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Draugr (Elder Scrolls) - Freeform, Friendship, Gen, Illustrated, Imperials vs Stormcloaks, Khajiit-Lalli, Nord-Emil, POV Alternating, Quest: The Jagged Crown, Retelling, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-10 03:39:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14729244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talimee/pseuds/Talimee, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Urania_baba/pseuds/Urania_baba
Summary: Morning Star, 4E202: As they follow Legate Rikke and the Dragonborn on the hunt for the Jagged Crown, Emil and J'Lalli learn a bit about themselves and about each other. Because what is a Draugr-filled tomb good for if not the confrontation with one's own mortality and the question about what's really important in Life?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I would say that this is my first real fanfiction for Skyrim. Up until now it was more a backdrop of setting against which I played dolls with my favourite boys, but Korvanjund gives a good stage for something more, especially if the POV is not that of the Dovahkiin.
> 
> My deepest gratitude goes to Urania_Baba for her valuable and in-depth comments and her awesome illustrations for this.

Some days were so cold that Emil was convinced he could hear frost tinkling in the air. Today was one of those days with the wind in the north-west, bringing with it dry air from Whiterun's tundra and the deep freeze of the Pale. He closed his eyes and smiled, drew a deep breath and enjoyed the plunge of freezing air into his lungs. The only thing missing to make this moment perfect was sunlight but Legate Rikke had given orders to stay hidden under the firs and wait for sunset – and for the Dovahkiin to arrive.

Emil was in two minds about that. He knew that Sigrun would have never waited up for the man. The Tribune would have expected him to _be there_ when she ordered the ambush, not the other way around. But the Dragonborn was an important person, a legend reborn– – if Emil remembered the stories all right, he had never given much thought to them, way back in Markarth, where everything around him had been solid rock and very real misery – and maybe one needed to make concessions to that.

“If J’Lalli has to wait here any longer he will become a furry popsicle”, Emil heard a dark mutter from behind his back where the only other member of Sigrun’s squad was trying to stay out of the breeze. He glanced over his shoulder and found the Khajiit glaring balefully back, huddled deep into his travelling cloak, face and neck fluffed out in an effort to stay warm. 

“What’s a popsicle?”, he asked quietly. 

J’Lalli’s mien grew even darker. “It is a delicacy in Elsweyr, where the temperatures seldom drop below freezing point – shaved ice, mixed with syrup and fruit, left to freeze again on a stick. This one would wonder why Nords have not come up with this idea themselves if he hadn’t seen first hand how unimaginative they are.”

Emil let the jibe hang in the air for a second and nodded. “I guess, there’s no point in frozen food when you need to stay warm.”

J’Lalli gave him a Look before shaking his head sadly. “Khajiit’s wits must have become sluggish with the cold”, he muttered darkly. “Half a dozen ways of poking fun at his comrade but J’Lalli doesn’t think it worthwhile.”

It was Emil’s turn to be confused now – take this as a compliment on their friendship or at face value that J’Lalli didn’t think him a worthwhile conversationalist? – but after a second he pushed it aside and gestured towards his pack. “You can have my blanket if you’re still cold. I don’t need i–”

“Will you shut up?”, a Quaestor hissed next to them. “Or do you want to announce to the Stormcloaks right away that we’re here?”

Emil jerked to attention, cheeks blushing furiously, but J’Lalli just lazily righted himself and flicked his cloak off his shoulders. “We’re no longer waiting”, he sneered and pointed haughtily across the open tundra. “The latecomer is approaching.”

 

~*~

 

Where there had been forced inactivity for hours, everything went fast now: The Dragonborn reached their disguised campsite and Rikke met him to talk about her plan. Nothing betrayed her mood but a small stiffness in her back. J’Lalli was not sure, if it was deference or annoyance. Or both. He did not care, either. Not when Emil’s cheeks were prettily flushed with embarrassment nearby.

J’Lalli did a double-take and then threw a look heaven-wards, seeking out the reassuring presence of Jone and Jode as was his wont, when this weird and foreign country got into his head and made him think weird and foreign things himself. Everything was strange here! And even when J’Lalli thought he had worked it all out, along came someone like Emil, who didn’t fit any mould J’Lalli knew.

It infuriated him. It piqued his interest. He loved throwing snide remarks at Emil, or tease him with witticisms, and watch the Nord work it out and then just ignore it. Every day J’Lalli put his claw on the line, pushed the boundaries, and every day anew Emil just moved out of reach. It was _Riddle’Thar_. It was the only thing that kept J’Lalli sane in this land of frozen death.

He unpacked his bow as Rikke turned back to them and gave encouragement to her troops. J'Lalli would have listened in more carefully, perhaps, if, after months of it, he wasn’t getting sick of the Nords’ foibles in regard to mortality. Certainly, all life must end _someday_. But the Khajiit had found that Nords’ thoughts tended to pivot around the fastest possible way to Sovngarde than around the life they had before that. It was pitiful, to be sure.

He twanged his newly strung bow with a claw, satisfied at the tension, and turned his attention back to Rikke in time to see her motioning them forward. He fitted an arrow, and moved out, quickly overtaking the other troops in their cumbersome gear. Their time would come soon enough – now he and the other bowmen darted forward, climbed the edges of recently excavated Korvanjund, and let loose a hail of arrows. Every one of his shots struck true, felling Stormcloaks as they scrambled up from their bedrolls and camp-fires, while his comrades’ arrows went often enough astray when their quarries moved out of the circles of light. J’Lalli’s cat-like eyes though saw them all.

When the rest of the troops poured down the weathered steps into the ruin's courtyard the other bowmen stopped shooting, drew their own swords and joined the melee. J’Lalli remained on guard, though, arrow pitted on the string and bow drawn taut, vigilant against any ambush or attempt at sneaking away to raise alarm to other Stormcloaks nearby. He only left his post when the battle below had well and truly ended, the last Stormcloaks killed and Rikke motioned them onwards into the ruins.

He joined them in a small antechamber, where the smell of blood and burning meat permeated the air. J’Lalli's gaze fell on a handful of corpses stacked unceremoniously in one corner of the room: apparently, Ulfric Stormcloak’s men hadn’t been the first ones to re-enter Korvanjund after it was buried for thousands of years, and not the first ones to die here either.

“You are all right?”, he asked under his breath when he stepped up to Emil at the back of the throng. He saw the Nord flinch and whip around to him, saw a flicker of _something_ on his face, before it dissolved into relief and a quick nod.

“This one is glad”, J’Lalli said and he meant it.


	2. Chapter 2

Emil swallowed against the bile in his throat and tried to find a spot – any spot – that would allow him to concentrate on something other than the dead people lying around him. But as his instincts calmed, his mind woke up and noticed the stench of blood and bowels, the redness of floor and walls and the broken, glassy-eyed stares of the fallen around him. Nearly all of them Stormcloaks, Rikke congratulated them on that, and Emil tried to focus on her words now and what she had said before she had given the order to attack: that all Stormcloak soldiers were the Enemy now, traitors to Skyrim and her people, and that they wouldn't hesitate to kill them – _him_ – if the tables had been turned.

She had said that they deserved their fate.

But he could not bring himself to believe it. He could not!

He hadn't thought of it in the heat of the battle. In the midst of confusion and screaming and metal on metal or wood or flesh his mind had been blank, just reacting to what his senses and instincts told it to do. But now he saw what he had done. The dead around him, men and women, they had been alive just an hour before. Daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles.

“Some of you may know men on the other side”, Rikke had said before the slaughter began. “But remember, they are the enemy now.”

 _Father_.

His hands shook, he gripped shield and sword faster. Gritted his teeth. The mission had barely begun, he could not break down already! What would Sigrun think of him?! His shivers crawled up his arms, to his knees, and teeth. Emil was sure that, if he hadn’t been weighed down by sixty pounds of leather and steel, he would have shook like an aspen leaf. Why did he ever think that he could make it in the Imperial Legion? He was not a fighter! Never had been! _Milk-drinker_ he had been called back in Markarth, and now for the first time, Emil thought that the people there might have been right.

“Are you all right?”

Emil flinched at the low murmur behind his back. He hadn’t noticed J’Lalli stepping up to him. He half-turned, opened his mouth to reply but stopped himself – all his dread might have spilled out otherwise, so he just nodded. He was sound in body, at least, and seeing that his only friend for miles around was well as well flooded his body with relief.

“This one is glad”, J’Lalli said and Emil felt a lightness flutter in him that he couldn't name nor understand.

“You there! Have you been listening?!”, snapped a voice from the front and Emil jerked around to see Legate Rikke scowl at him. Between them the other soldiers readied their weapons, hefted their shields. A few threw him contemptuous looks.

Before Emil could even begin to rake his brain for whatever plan the Legate had explained, J’Lalli answered for him. “Sneak into chamber, take cover, wait for your signal, then brutally savage all Stormcloaks we find, yes?”, the Khajiit drawled, exaggerating his accent to the point of sounding positively outlandish. Emil winced, but neither Rikke nor the Dragonborn took offence instead the Legate nodded crisply. Torches were extinguished, the watch-fire doused, the heavy doors to Korvanjund pushed open and they hurried through.

As was to be expected, the Stormcloak guards did not wait for them to form ranks or take cover. Even without the help of their silhouettes outlined against the backdrop of light, Ulfric’s militia loosened arrows at them in the hopes of killing them out of sheer luck. Emil pushed his shield out and above, dimly saw his comrades doing the same, just as they had learned in drills, and inched forward. He yelped as an unexpected weight landed on his shield, forcing his arms down, but before he could try to re-balance, the weight was gone again, but other grunts and curses erupted from others around him and drew an audible path away from them.

Suddenly, screams echoed through the ruins.

Emil jerked upwards and his sword out of its scabbard, panting already, and pushed forward. Something dark and old rose in him and took over, barrelled him through other soldiers, shield in front, sword clenched in an unflinching fist. He barely noticed the vast stretch of cleared space as he ran across it. Broken-down pillars. Moss and fungi. Lit braziers, low dais, Stormcloaks. Some were sprawled in spreading pools of blood already, others drew their axes. An arrow slammed into his shield, the impact nearly enough to make him stumble. He turned the spin into a lunge forward, raised his sword, was amongst the foe –

 

*

 

“You _imbecile!_ ”, Rikke snarled.

J’Lalli’s ears flicked backwards. Who would have thought that the restrained and fair-minded Legate could become so furious? And about nothing, really. She had him and Emil stand in front of her, shaking with anger, as she berated him for… J’Lalli did not really know what. A quick look to the side brought no answers as well, as Emil was standing to attention, staring straight ahead with a face as white as chalk.

“What were your orders?”, Rikke hissed, but interrupted him as soon as J’Lalli opened his mouth. “I know you knew! You were the one _to repeat them back to me_ not twenty minutes ago! Why did you go against them?”

Now, that was an easy question to answer. “Because they had become redundant”, J’Lalli explained. He relaxed a fraction, but swayed backwards when Rikke exploded in a curse.

“Redundant?!”, she bellowed. “I tell you what’s _redundant_ : The injuries of good soldiers, who were hit by arrows because you two broke formation!” J’Lalli took a deep breath to launch into a justification, but Rikke wouldn’t let him. “One word, soldier”, she snarled, “one word and I’ll haul your furry ass to Castle Dour myself and not even all the Eides in the world will save you from a court-martial. And you!” She spun around to Emil who looked like has going to faint. “What made you think that you could charge into a Stormcloak ambush all by yourself?”

“I d–didn’t think”, Emil stuttered and went beet-red.

“That much was obvious”, the Legate snapped, but seemed mollified by Emil’s obvious discomfort. “Think about it that way, soldier: Would you barge into a burning hay-loft to safe the family cat?”, she asked gruffly and appeared satisfied at Emil’s stuttered denial. J’Lalli looked at Emil’s body language instead and was satisfied as well. Of course, Emil would run back into a burning house, or forward into any danger, in an attempt to rescue a friend. J’Lalli knew that and cherished his comrade’s compassion, but he also made a mental note to cure the Nord of that habit.

“Good.” Rikke nodded and turned away from them to the rest of the troops who had been busy clearing the corpses away and scouting the ruins ahead. “Praefect”, she called and a young man jogged up to her. “You take your squad and the injured, and stay here in case…”

J’Lalli drowned her out and turned to Emil who had sagged with relief and looked as if he wanted nothing more than to sink into the ground, never to be seen again.

“Do you think, Sigrun will hear of this?”, Emil asked in a whisper, already dreading the Tribune’s disappointment whose approval Emil craved, as a mentor and as a surrogate parent. J’Lalli flicked his ears again. Another habit he had to train his friend out of.

“She will hear about this”, he said truthfully and saw Emil wince. “But we know her”, he added with a shrug, “and she knows us. As long as we don’t betray the Legion, she will support us.” He hefted his bow and was ready to trudge along behind the departing troops, when Rikke’s hand clapped down on his shoulder like a vice.

“You stay here”, she growled. “I can't risk you dashing forward again later and confuse my troops about who they should follow. Your skill with the bow is more useful to me here.”

She went away and left him standing there. His heart sank when Emil threw one last look back at him over his shoulder before he hesitantly followed the main force deeper into the tomb.

J’Lalli did not trust him to come back alive.

 


End file.
